One year and a lifetime ago, American society was vaguely stable and fundamentalist Mormon cult leader Lyle Jeffs was facing federal charges for food stamp fraud and money laundering. Jeffs disappeared while awaiting trial, with his court-appointed lawyer dryly suggesting that perhaps he’d been raptured into Heaven. …

Lyle Jeffs, the acting head of the polygamous, child-bride-marrying Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has disappeared, the FBI says. Jeffs was awaiting trial on federal food stamp fraud and money laundering charges. His brother, Warren, is serving life in prison plus 20 years for raping…

In July 2014, my husband Daniel, our two young boys, and I took a full U-Haul from Cleveland, Tenn., to Richmond, Va., for Daniel’s new job as a teacher at a Christian private school. The move had pushed us past broke, into donations from relatives, but we were eager nonetheless. After many years, my husband had…

CHRISTMAS APPROACHETH. And how's the War Upon faring? Well, not too good lately: one study says almost half of Americans are A-OK with Christian paraphernalia on government property. Also, 73 percent believe in the virgin birth. And yet Kirk Cameron's Saving Christmasstill can't catch a break.

In the course of 20/20's exhaustive investigation last week into abuses and coverups within the Independent Fundamental Baptist Church (IFB), there is some penitence. Well, just a little. But not with Jack Schaap, who was shown excoriating women for being fat and not having any scriptural authority.

The same sex couple attempted to visit the museum together on the institution's "Date Night" (because nothing says "romance" like some good old fashioned fact-ignoring). The two men were denied entrance at the door by a security guard who said that the presence of a same-sex couple at the event would ruin everyone…

Oh, wonderful. I love it when people I disdain get exactly what they want. Wait. Opposite of that. TLC (stands for The LightMyCollegeDegreeOnFire Channel) will air another 10-episode season of the Fundamentalist Point N' Gawk Hour starting in March 2011.

We'd sort of assumed that, after the suffocation death of that little boy, the ministry behind the controversial Christian strain of obedience-inducing "chastisement" had been discredited. Far from it: another child died as a result of their methods: